JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK Page 4

  In contrast, my book has been written utilizing a pattern of chronology and autobiography. I was ordered to active military duty in July 1941, and as an Air Transport Command V.I.P. pilot, I was on duty in Cairo and Teheran during those important, highest level conferences of late November 1943. I participated in one of the initial, pivotal moves of the Cold War in the Balkans during September 1944 while the Soviet Union was still publicly considered to be one of our wartime allies. I was on Okinawa at the end of World War II and had made air transport flights into Japan before the official surrender on September 2, 1945; and returned again to the Far East as commander of a Military Air Transport Service squadron based in Tokyo from 1952 through 1954. During those years, I made many flights into Indochina and what became the nation of South Vietnam in 1954.

  In 1955 I was designated by the chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force to establish an office of special operations within that headquarters in compliance with National Security Council (NSC) Directive #5412 of March 15, 1954. This NSC Directive for the first time in the history of the United States defined covert operations and assigned that role to the Central Intelligence Agency to perform such missions, provided they had been directed to do so by the NSC, and further ordered active-duty Armed Forces personnel to avoid such operations. At the same time, the Armed Forces were directed to “provide the military support of the clandestine operations of the CIA” as an official function.

  I established that office and created its global clandestine support system. For the next nine years, 1955—1964, I served five of those years with the Air Force, two with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and two more with the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in that unique function of “supporting the CIA’s secret clandestine operations.” This book documents the “Saigon Solution”—that complex and powerful element of the Cold war master plan that, according to R. Buckminster Fuller, generated no less than six trillion dollars for its beneficiaries, who were in most cases many of the same members of the military-industrial complex so aptly defined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address, on January 17, 1961.

  How can that cabal of conspirators who now control this One World be so powerful that it is possible for them to control the minds of our presidents, our media, and our entire educational system? This book is a personal account of the characteristics of that power elite and of its activities on an international scale during the Cold War. There is an overpowering reason why this is important.

  The greatest war in the history of mankind came to a sudden and spectacular close with the detonation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. Those pivotal events not only brought the Japanese to the surrender table on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, but they also caused the ubiquitous highest cabal of this world to realize that they made an irreparable mistake when they permitted, yes, encouraged, nuclear scientists to create the nuclear weapon. They can never put the genie back in the bottle. From now on warfare must be limited, or all-out warfare will obliterate life on Earth.

  World War II was over and conventional warfare died with it. In the ancient days, “war began with plunder, and the weapons at hand.” Carl von Clauswitz added in 1833 in his book Vom Kriege that “war is not merely a political act but a political instrument.” That was better; but, it was Alexis de Tocqueville, in his insightful book, Democracy in America, of 1835, who began to define “war” in its modern dress: “The secret connection between the military character and that of the democracies was the profit motive.” With that precise statement de Tocqueville modernized the true concept of warfare: It is driven by the profit motive; it must be profitable. Another way to put it is that the profiteers make war as a necessity.

  How many of us realize that back in November 1943, when Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt met in Cairo with Chiang Kai-shek, they were not only making plans for victory over the Axis powers in Europe, they were laying the groundwork for a follow-on period of warfare in eastern Asia, in Indochina (1945), Korea (1950), and Indonesia (1958) following the defeat of Japan? Few historians seem to recall that also in Cairo was Chiang Kai-shek’s wife Mei-Ling, the American-educated sister of T. V. Soong, then the wealthiest man in the world, and she actually took part in the work of the conference along with activities of T. V. Soong’s Chinese delegates, who were Chiang’s advisors.

  During October 1943, I had been directed to fly a Geological Survey Team, under the leadership of Gen. C. R. Smith, founder and president of American Airlines and an “oil wise” Texan, to Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt had sent that select team into Saudi Arabia to meet with representatives of the California Standard Oil Company at their remote quarters on Ras Tanura. Following that visit they had been directed to join the President in Cairo. Their glowing report of the “limitless” quantity of petroleum under the sands of Arabia caused Roosevelt to order the expedited construction of a 50,000-barrel-per-day refinery on that site. It was in operation before the end of 1945. Thus began the modern petroleum era in the midst of war.

  Even more importantly, after these delegates of Chiang Kai-shek and T. V. Soong had actively participated in Cairo in the planning for the post—World War II activities in the Far East, they flew on to Teheran, for that historic conference with Stalin. The fact that immediately following the Cairo Conference the Chinese delegation was in Teheran for that meeting with Josef Stalin has not been recorded in the history books of this era. This is a most important omission. I was pilot of the plane that flew them there from Cairo. During the sometimes heated exchanges between Roosevelt and Churchill on the subject of “the end of colonialism in Southeast Asia,” plans were made by all four conferees for a period of continuing warfare in Indochina, Korea, and Indonesia under the guise of that Cold War “cover story.”

  In fact, Ho Chi Minh, with an American OSS man and U.S. Army general standing on each side of him, declared the Independence of Indochina on the same date—September 2, 1945—of the Japanese surrender. That date marks the beginning of the three decades of the Vietnam War, as it was called. But the Cold War actually began even earlier while World War II was still being fought against the Axis powers.

  In September 1944, while I was stationed in Cairo, I was asked by the commanding general of the Middle East Command, Benjamin Giles, and by my own Cairo base commander, Gen. Robert J. Smith, to fly them to Aleppo, Syria. There we met with British Intelligence officers who had been informed by their Secret Intelligence Service and by our own OSS that a freight train loaded with about 750 U.S. Air crewmen POWs was secretly en route to Syria from Romania via the Balkans and Turkey. The American POWs had been shot down in the Balkans during air raids on the Ploesti oil fields. The train traveled from Bucharest, Romania, via the Balkans and Turkey to the vicinity of Aleppo.

  That night, after returning from Aleppo, I arranged for about thirty transport aircraft to fly on the following day, to that same landing ground north of Aleppo and close to the Turkish border where the railroad track enters Syria. We flew to Syria, met the freight train from Bucharest, loaded the POWs onto our aircraft, and began the flight back to Cairo. Among the 750 American POWs there were perhaps a hundred Nazi intelligence agents, along with scores of Nazi-sympathetic Balkan agents. They had been hidden in this shipment by the OSS to get them out of the way of the Soviet army that had marched into Romania on September 1.

  This September 1944 operation was the first major pro-German, anti-Soviet activity of its kind of the Cold War. With OSS assistance, many followed in quick succession, including the escape and carefully planned flight of General Reinhart Gehlen, the German army’s chief intelligence officer, to Washington on September 20, 1945.

  The war against the Germans ended on May 8, 1945, and an increasing allied force escalated the war against Japan. Around the world, most believed, with the surrender of Japan four month later, that war-making had ended, despite the enormous shadow of nuclear weapons that loomed over the horizon. They were wrong.

  Me
anwhile, a new, limited, clandestine paramilitary type of warfare emerged in some of the hot spots of the world. The Korean War began in May 1950 and, almost immediately, U.S. Armed Forces accompanied by their new CIA associates became involved. By the time the North Korean forces surrendered, the somewhat dormant warfare in Indochina had flared up, on schedule. Here American participation, as noted earlier, was under the clandestine operational control of CIA agents, most of whom had valuable World War II military experience. By 1954 the United States government for the first time found it necessary to define covert operations.

  As mentioned previously, the National Security Council Directive 5412 of March 15, 1954, became the U.S. government’s basic directive on covert activities. Further it stated emphatically that “such operations shall not include armed conflict by recognized military forces.” (Note: it is this stipulation that prohibited the utilization of military “air cover” during the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961.) The CIA became a member of the NSC 5412 Special Group, and responsibility for those covert operations that had been directed by the NSC was assigned to the CIA, with the full support of the military departments, as requested, and with full reimbursement for all “out-of-pocket” expenses.

  During a meeting of the President’s Special Committee on Indochina, January 20, 1954, the CIA was authorized to include an “unconventional warfare officer, specifically Colonel Lansdale,” in a group of five others being sent to Vietnam to create the Saigon Military Mission. This unit was in place by July 1954 in time to support the new president, Ngo Dinh Diem, of the new country South Vietnam. In May 1954, Ho Chi Minh’s army defeated the French forces at Dien Bien Phu. A Geneva Conference was convened to arrange an agreement between the new countries of North Vietnam and South Vietnam. One proviso of that agreement authorized any resident of the north who chose to move to the south to do so, and the same applied to those in the south.

  On March 8, 1955, in a speech delivered nationwide, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles reported, “So far, about six hundred thousand persons have fled from northern Vietnam, and before the exodus is over the number will probably approach one million. They are destitute and penniless persons with only such possessions as they can carry on their backs.” Under the control of the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission, they had been transported by U.S. Navy transport ships and by the CIA’s Civil Air Transport airline from the north to the Saigon region in the south.

  In an effort to account for the success of its work with these “refugees” the SMM declared its tactics to include “psychological warfare.” Today, we would more accurately call it terrorism.” Is it any wonder that the program labeled “Communist-inspired insurgency” that emerged in the south arose because this horde of displaced people was forced to fight for food, shelter, and the necessities of life? This is the way that the CIA and its sponsors made war in Vietnam. By late 1960 our own forces had created the concept of “counterinsurgency.”

  All of this was well known to the then-Senator John F. Kennedy. During the years since the end of World War II, he had been a member of the House of Representatives and a U.S. Senator and served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He had met Ngo Dinh Diem during 1953 and had met the Cuban exile political leaders as early as August 1960. They were working with the CIA at that time. He knew as much, or more, about the training of Cuban exiles under the CIA and of their plans for removal of Castro as Nixon did . . . perhaps more. It was during the final television debate of the presidential campaign with Nixon that Kennedy outmaneuvered Nixon, especially regarding anti-Castro policies, and many believe that this made it possible for him to be elected president in November 1960. It was during this same month, after the election, that the CIA quietly upgraded the Eisenhower administration’s March 1960 approval of a modest Cuban-exile support program from small air-drop and over-the-beach operations to a 3,000-man invasion brigade—a plan that Kennedy inherited.

  In brief, this Preface is an outline of the national and world affairs of the U.S. government as Kennedy inherited them from the eight-year Republican administration under Eisenhower. At that time, January 1961, I had been in the Pentagon for six years and was working in the Office of Special Operations, a direct function of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Thomas Gates. This office was, among other things, responsible for the CIA relationship and special operations as well as for reviewing the development and execution of plans and programs of the National Security Agency.

  The most noticeable characteristic of that “lame duck” period, which became evident as the Kennedy newcomers began to replace the departing Eisenhower old-timers, was the frequently mentioned and vehemently expressed dislike by the old-timers in the halls of the Pentagon for the new President. This developed as a result of his defeat of Nixon and the end of the Republican administration’s policies. It was further exacerbated by the representatives of the military-industrial complex who had been working so successfully with the tenants of the Pentagon since World War II—particularly on the procurement plans for the high-cost “hardware” support of the warfare-to-come in Vietnam. Kennedy was hated from the start. They knew his reputation. He was certain to be a threat to their future expectations.

  All of a sudden the die was cast with the sabotage of the Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961. Quite unbelievably, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, the man in charge of that operation, was out of the country on the day of the landings. Equally troublesome was the fact that the essential, pre-dawn air strike on D-Day by Cuban Exile Brigade bombers from Nicaragua to destroy Castro’s last three combat jets that Kennedy, himself, had directed, had been cancelled the night before D-Day by Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy. That telephone call by Bundy was made just four hours before the Exile Brigade’s B-26s were to take off from Nicaragua on that Kennedy-ordered strike.

  Everyone connected with the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion knew that the policy dictated by NSC 5412, March 1954, positively prohibited the utilization of active-duty military personnel in covert operations. At no time was an “air cover” provision written into the official invasion plan developed by an experienced and highly competent U.S. Marine Colonel and approved, with that stipulation, by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President. The “air cover” story that has been created since the failure of the Brigade is incorrect.

  President Kennedy reacted quickly and deftly, as soon as the Brigade was forced to surrender. He formed a Cuban Study Group one day after the Brigade’s defeat and charged it with the responsibility of determining the cause for the failure of that operation he had inherited from the previous administration. That prestigious and diverse study group consisting of Allen Dulles, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Adm. Arleigh Burke, and Robert Kennedy, reported that Bundy’s telephone call to General Cabell that cancelled the President’s air strike order was the primary reason for the failure on the beach and the surrender of the Cuban Exile Brigade.

  The language of the report, as written by General Taylor and unanimously agreed to by the group, was used almost verbatim by the president when he issued National Security Action Memorandum, #55, June 28, 1961, which began the process of changing the responsibility “for the defense of the nation in the Cold War similar to that which they have in conventional hostilities” from the CIA to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When fully implemented, as Kennedy had planned, after his reelection in 1964, it would have taken the CIA out of the covert operations business. This proved to be one of the first nails in John F. Kennedy’s coffin.

  By mid-1963 Kennedy had arrived at the brink of a decision to keep all American troops out of Vietnam and to withdraw “all U.S. personnel”—military, CIA, and others—“from Vietnam by the end of 1965.” Anyone interested in the exact coverage of the steps in this policy making should read the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961—1963, vol. IV, “Vietnam: August—December 1963” by the Department of State and published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991. This offi
cial record documents twenty-six highest level meetings in the White House with President Kennedy during the period August 28, 1963, to November 13, 1963. At the same time, my immediate superior officer, Maj. Gen. Victor H. Krulak attended twenty-three of those meetings in addition to making a quick visit to South Vietnam. Such a full schedule, in the White House and with the President among other high officials, in such a concentrated period is most unusual. It shows clearly how closely Kennedy made an analysis of the Vietnam situation his own problem, and it relates precisely the ideas he brought to the attention of his key staff on the subject.

  It is significant to note that as General Krulak came and went from the White House during that busy period, including his quick trip to and from Vietnam, he would call several of us on his staff into his office each day, discuss the notes he had made,and give us instructions concerning what he wanted done for the next day’s meeting with Kennedy. Quite naturally, I was intimately aware of this planning process, its policies, and precisely what the President intended as Vietnam policy for 1964 and 1965.

  The president considered it imperative for Secretary McNamara and General Taylor to visit Vietnam during that troubled time one month before the Diems were to be removed from Saigon to Europe in accordance with his approved plan. At the same, General Krulak was made responsible for producing the final document for President Kennedy that would be known as the McNamara—Taylor Trip Report, October 2, 1963.

  It was carefully written by several of us in the Pentagon under General Krulak’s guidance, utilizing the notes and personal comments of the President. Charts and photos were added, as necessary, and it was bound in leather. It was not something produced by the two principals during their busy travels. When completed and approved, Krulak arranged for a jet fighter aircraft to rush it to Hawaii where it was given to the travelers in order that they might become completely familiar with it before their plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. As soon as they landed, they boarded a helicopter for the White House, where they ceremoniously gave the report to the president.